I started talking with Catherine Pauling, who has worked at UC Berkeley more than 20 years, because I confused her with someone else. While she was head student advisor in the Math Department, she increased the number of majors from 170 to 600 in 5 years. “Some math professors were afraid this was too many — it could only occur because we were bringing in inadequate students, they believed,” she said. “But the percentage of students having trouble and excelling remained the same.”
When advising math majors, she told me, “sometimes I felt there should have been a Red Cross on my door.” She learned to preach compassion — compassion for the professors. She said over and over to the students,
You have to realize it’s not you. The professors will say terrible things like ‘You know nothing.’ But that’s because in the process of becoming the best in what they do, they’ve neglected certain social and communication skills. So we have to appreciate and learn from their gifts and have compassion for their lack of development in these other areas.
Over the years, she was repeatedly shocked by how undergraduates were treated. “If someone has achieved so much, I would have thought it would be easy to be generous. Instead of an interest in mentoring the next generation, I often found impatience and dismissal,” she said. “One student explained to me the difference between Stanford and Berkeley. At Stanford, if a student has a problem, they [faculty and administrators] assume that they’re approaching it wrong and they try a new approach; at Berkeley, if a student has a problem, the assumption is that we made a mistake in admitting the student.”
One recent Dean of the College of Letters and Science (also a professor) began his tenure as dean, she told me, by giving a talk in which he emphasized his belief that students were “gaming the system.” He acted on this belief by rigidly enforcing the rules, with few exceptions. (Many Berkeley students suffer serious hardships, including homelessness and major mental disorders.) When he stopped being dean several years later, it was to take a better position at another university. The next dean was less strict.
A member of my family attended Berkeley about 15 years ago, and she lasted under a semester after transferring with an “A” average from elsewhere. The impression I got was that the school was totally heartless. The core classes had 300 students in them, and no one to turn to for help. Dormitory rules went completely unenforced. She hated it and left quickly.
While accurately quoted above, I want to encourage anyone at or interested in attending U C Berkeley to find advisors like myself to help you achieve your academic goals. We can teach you how to join or create smaller communities within a large campus, form mentoring relationships with faculty, master the bureacracy, and enrich your classroom opportunities with research and work internships. I am a Cal alum and have worked here for 20 years because I know what we have to offer. Learning how to learn, even in a challenging environment, can be an important life lesson.
I think advisors at UC Berkeley are like band-aids — they can do little about a deep-seated problem.
I have never understood the “learning how to learn” argument. Everyone learns all the time — babies, animals, young children, apprentices. That’s what the brain is mostly about: learning. Surely we used our brains effectively before colleges came along.
this contradicts my (and probably many others) stereotypes of UC Berkeley (Professors at Stanford tend to be less elitist than Berkeley???!!!).
there are no excuses, but I wonder if part of it is a product of undergraduate student size. As Dennis commented above, when professors can’t develop personal relationships with students, its easier to be rude. also, with large class sizes, Berkeley might attract professors who don’t want to develop positive relationships with students. At my small liberal arts school, with less research opportunities, I could tell that the professors loved interacting with students.
Is it possible that professors who are often educated at smaller, elite private institutions showcase snobbery towards a larger, public student body? I have trouble comprehending this because UC Berkeley is such an elite institution. but maybe.
There was a nearly four-fold increase in students majoring in math in a five year period? What there an equivalent increase in the math faculty? Was the real objection by the math professors that the students couldn’t be adequately taught in that environment? People often become dismissive towards their subordinates and coworkers when they are overworked.
I love the stereotype about math professors having poor social and communication skills. Playing on such inaccurate stereotypes doesn’t make for a strong argument. It says more about that particular advisor than anyone else.
The problem with lower lever math classes is that they are the classes most math professors like to teach the least and they are full of students who have little real interest in and less respect for mathematics. When I was an undergraduate engineering major, once upon a time, I had the experience of listening to an engineering professor mock the mathematics professors in an engineering class lecture. That kind of attitude doesn’t lead to comfortable conversations between engineering students and math professors. (Of course, I also had the experience of listening to an engineering professor mock liberal arts students for being outside and enjoying a warm spring afternoon. That’s the point where I realized engineering wasn’t the major I wanted.) In my experience math professors become a whole lot more friendly to students they see in upper level classes taking mathematics seriously. Of course, even that is going to be difficult in a math department where faculty growth hasn’t kept up with student growth.
I’ve wandered a bit, but you really don’t provide enough for anyone to do more than wander and wonder what you’re talking about. Over on the Huffington Post, and here on your own blog apparently, you’ve done a good job of presenting anecdotes about various problems in various different situations but you consistently provide insufficient details or analysis to determine what you’re really getting at, if anything. You seem unsatisfied with college education but you don’t seem to know why.
Oh, I know why. The core problem is that professors have too much power, students too little. And their desires are quite different. In my post For Whom Do Colleges Exist? I was pretty explicit about this. Or so I thought.
“Playing on such inaccurate stereotypes [that of the socially-inept math professor] doesn’t make for a strong argument.” There might be room for improvement, I agree. But let me ask you two questions: 1. Why are you sure the stereotype is inaccurate in this case (Berkeley math professors)? 2. What would be a better approach for a student advisor to take, to replace the one you don’t like?